Microsoft Begins a Push Into the Polling World

People are slowly getting used to asking digital assistants like Apple’s Siri simple questions, like “Will it rain tomorrow?” and “Where was Justin Bieber arrested?” Soon, cellphones may be the ones doing the asking — surveying people on more serious matters like their choice for president and how the United States should confront the Islamic State.

On Monday, Microsoft is starting a relatively straightforward survey website called Microsoft Prediction Lab, where users can submit their views and predictions regarding politics, sports and other subjects. The more novel part of Microsoft’s plan will come later, though, when Cortana — Microsoft’s answer to Siri — could start conducting interviews herself, imitating human pollsters.

Microsoft’s entry into surveys could become another step in the polling field’s journey away from random-digit dialing of landline telephones and toward newer technologies like cellphones and the Internet. Polling analysts will watch Cortana not just because of its novelty but also because of its potential to provide a human-sounding voice at little cost.

“The field is in a state of flux — everyone in the profession recognizes that there are a lot of challenges to our traditional methods,” said Scott Keeter, the director of survey research of the Pew Research Center, one of the country’s most respected polling groups. “I think this kind of experimentation is overdue.”

Microsoft’s survey website derives directly from the company’s relatively quiet 2012 polling experiment with, of all things, its Xbox video game console. Despite a sample that was overwhelming male and heavily young, Microsoft researchers were able to weight the answers to produce an outcome generally in line with major exit polls and other probabilistic models, according to a paper published in the International Journal of Forecasting.

“It’s a pretty extreme example of a skewed population,” said Douglas Rivers, a professor of political science at Stanford and the chief scientist of YouGov, a research firm that conducts Internet polls and is providing online-survey data to The New York Times for this year’s midterm elections.

Mr. Rivers, who helped Microsoft analyze Xbox data for a study on swing voters, added: “The belief is that the population is very weird and unusual, and you can’t say what’s going on generally. It turns out that it’s a little less weird than you would guess.”

Polls have traditionally relied on landline telephones because random samples of phone numbers allows pollsters to approximate an entire population, and such surveys generally remain the most highly regarded. But as more people decline to answer poll questions, and move toward cellphones that are harder to track, the advantage of traditional polls has shrunk. The response rate of landline-phone polls has plummeted from 36 percent in 1997 to just 9 percent in 2012, according to Pew, decreasing reliability and increasing costs.

With almost nine in 10 Americans now online, a new breed of survey companies, from Google to SurveyMonkey, are competing with traditional forms, trading the randomness of telephone polls for the droves of data accessible cheaply over the Internet. The two approaches share the same challenge: how to weight respondents so that an unrepresentative slice of the population — those people willing to indulge a telephone pollster, or those who volunteer over the Internet — can become representative.

The easy part of Microsoft’s 2012 experiment was asking 350,000 gamers whether they would vote for President Obama or Mitt Romney. The challenge was analyzing the responses of a group that was 93 percent male and almost two-thirds aged 18 to 29.

Even though the sample had very few members of some demographic groups — Hispanic women over 50, for example — it did have enough Hispanics, women and people over 50 for the researchers to learn about those groups’ leanings more broadly. Statistical techniques then estimated the probability that a random person with any of 176,000 combinations of characteristics would vote come Election Day; no information from outside sources was used.

“Sometimes we have zero people in a specific demographic,” said David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research who led the project. “But even if you don’t have an exact match, those people are made up of pieces of many groups. You can make predictions about them.”

James J. Cochran, a professor of statistics at the University of Alabama, said that Microsoft’s nonrandom polling methods were statistically sound but that they might not always work as well as they did in 2012.

“The biggest concern is that it’s one instance,” Mr. Cochran said. “You don’t know if it will work again.”

Microsoft will move away from the Xbox for this fall’s midterm elections to focus on its new website, allowing for vastly more respondents from different demographic groups. It will communicate through web browsers such as Apple’s Safari or Google’s Chrome, so the interface can appear on all phones, tablets and computers, not just those running Microsoft software. Dedicated polling apps for iPhone and Android devices could follow.

The website will honor its playful Xbox roots through games that allow users to wager points on the outcome of various events, from local elections to "American Idol." Public standings would crown the best prognosticators.

And Microsoft will continue to explore one of the more intriguing aspects of online polling: the ability to monitor how and when people change their minds about an issue. Telephone polls usually do not reach the same person twice; the Microsoft polling almost invites people to log back in and register their changing opinions.

The downside is that respondents may be far more interested in a given issue than most people, although online surveys try to guard against that risk. The upside is that a panel containing some of the same people can track their views over time.

Such polls could allow the next Marco Rubio to assess the response of an on-camera water swig not just immediately, but over the ensuing days or weeks as ridicule fades. The National Football League could track how men and women react as more evidence emerges in scandals like the Ray Rice domestic abuse case and the Adrian Peterson child abuse case.

As for Cortana’s debut in asking questions, the company would not give a specific time frame for adding that feature. Mr. Rothschild said it would be “in the near term.”

“There are some robopolls out there with the recorded voice of a real person asking the question — there have been experiments with avatars administering polls to you,” he said. “But there are issues here, too. What’s the accent? Does she remind you of an old girlfriend or an ex-wife, and does that have an effect on your answers? For sensitive questions like drug use, are people more or less likely to tell Cortana the truth? This is why we need experiments like this.”